one you’re fixing to see here all dressed up and smelling like a flower.”
“She is way yonder not local, partner,” Charlie McPhee announced. “This gal is from England. Exeter, England.”
“What’s she doing in Port Arthur, Texas? Looking at the ship canal?”
“Oh, she hasn’t lived over yonder in England in a long old time,” Charlie said, putting out a hand to steady the box Waylon had brought up from the surface of the driveway in a series of jerks and stops. “She’s an American citizen and everything. Got her a house in Groves on a double lot. Her house is built on the corner one of the two. Makes it nice for gardening flowers and what have you.”
“You don’t suppose you could help me carry these clothes into the house, do you?” Waylon said, tilting the box back against his chest to get a better purchase and listening to his blood sing in his ears in the oven of midday. He lifted his eyes to the edge of the roof, but the bad moon was blocked from view. “If you’re not occupied.”
“Sure,” Charlie said, looking critically at the side of the box nearest him. “I don’t mind a bit. But I’m not going to hug that thing up to me. There’s something sticky all down this side of it, and I don’t want to get anything on my shirt.”
“Any effort you could provide, I’d be glad to take.”
“She’s been there in that house on Evangeline Street ever since she and her ex-husband split the sheets.”
“Divorced woman, huh?” Waylon said as he aimed his load at the space between his father’s Chrysler and the left wall of the garage, Charlie shuffling backward before him with one hand symbolically touching the bottom of the box.
“Oh, yeah. For over ten years now, she tells me. That kind of thing happens. Especially with foreign brides. Don’t come at me with that greasy side, now.”
“Maybe if you could see your way clear to guiding it a little bit.”
“Slow and careful does the trick,” Charlie McPhee said, backing away at an increased rate of speed to avoid the grease he saw threatening his clothes. “He’s a pipefitter. Retired, of course.”
“Who?” Waylon asked in a hoarse voice, yearning for the kitchen door and the cool air inside the house.
“The ex. Tit Boudreau.”
“His name is Tit? Good God.”
“That’s what they call him. Some kind of a French name, I reckon. It doesn’t mean what it sounds like. He’s bad to drink. And can’t hold his liquor, never could, Hazel told me. And smoke, Godalmighty, like a chimney, in this day and age after what all we know about tobacco.”
“Sounds like a bad hombre,” Waylon said.
“She only sees him when she has to. You know, holidays sometimes or when she’s over to her daughter’s and he shows up.” Charlie pointed toward the hall off the kitchen. “Your room’s down yonder where it always was. Take your stuff down there before you set anything down. Hell, they’re grown anyway and never there.”
“Who’s grown?” Waylon said, gathering himself for the last push down the hallway toward the bedroom where he felt like he’d spent most of his life. “The daughter?”
“No, the ex-step-grandkids. Hazel Boles’s ex-step-grandkids. Her ex-step-daughter’s almost as old as you are. Her real daughter, now she’s some years younger. Name’s Louise.”
After he had dumped the box of clothes on the floor by the single bed against the far wall of the room, Waylon went back to the kitchen to get a drink of water, wondering as he walked down the hall why his father always directed him to rooms in the house he’d grown up in. It was probably a reminder that he was just visiting and shouldn’t assume himself entitled to the knowledge of a permanent dweller.
Charlie was standing in the door to the garage, moving his head systematically from side to side as he checked the front of his white knit shirt for possible contaminants.
“I thought you said the woman’s name was Boudreau,” Waylon said between glasses of tap water. “What’d you just call her? Boles?”
“That’s her maiden name,” his father said, looking up from his shirtfront. “She went back to it after she filed her papers. That’s the way they do nowadays.”
“She wasn’t worried about her daughter having a different last name from hers?”
“Everybody’s got their own particular name now, Son,” Charlie McPhee said and leaned over to look at his reflection in the glass of the microwave oven above the counter. “You figure out what handle fits you, and then you know what?”
“What?”
“You go with it. That’s what.” Charlie stuck his left hand in his pants pocket and jangled his keys. “Speaking of which, I’m gone.”
“An English woman,” Waylon said. “Name of Hazel Boles. Meet her at a tea party?”
“No, not hardly. It was the funniest thing, Waylon. We run into each other twice in the big grocery store there by the produce department. Got to talking and one thing and another, and the next thing you knew we started going around together.”
“So you met cute? Over the broccoli, just like in the movies.”
“That’s right, Way. Only it wasn’t the broccoli. It was the herb section. And let me tell you something else. These old-world types like Hazel, they will flat eat a man up.”
“Damn, Daddy,” Waylon said.
“And you know something else?”
“No, and I’m scared to ask.”
“Hazel may be English to start with,” Charlie McPhee said, his eyes dancing as if he had just drunk two cups of Christmas eggnog, “but that hasn’t stopped her in the least from being just a little bit French.”
“Well, what you’re saying seems to fit the new pattern,” Waylon said. “Have you noticed the moon today? The weird way you can see it in the daytime? I believe some kind of a warp has set in.”
“No,” Charlie McPhee said. “I haven’t got time to be looking up at the moon, whether or not it’s weird or whether it’s day or night. I got places to go.”
“And people to see,” Waylon said, thinking to beat his father to the punch, but Charlie was already out the door into the garage and on his way into the light of midday by the time his son was able to get the words out.
After he had brought in the two other boxes from the trunk of his car, the one filled with papers and receipts and guarantees and the other holding the cassettes and paperback books, Waylon lay down on the bed. He would get the stuff from the backseat later, he told himself. It wasn’t going anywhere, and besides it was hot enough outside to make the asphalt soft in the cracks of the driveway. Walk around out there long enough and he’d get his shoes stuck to the pavement and shrivel up in the sun like a squashed toad.
From where he lay on the single bed, he could move his eyes to the right and see the front edge of the
